Love was selfish, wasn’t it? It made honest men want things they had no right to.

Etta Spencer is a violin prodigy. Living in New York City, it’s all she’s ever known, and all she’s ever wanted. With nobody but her cold, distant mother and her violin teacher she knows that there’s no other way except to make it big.

On an event before her debut, however, as Etta takes up her violin, everything goes disastrously wrong. There’s so much noise, so much pain, a dead body and then Etta can’t remember. Until she wakes up in a strange place, with strange people wearing strange clothes and a strange, captivating boy.

Etta’s life has taken a turn for the strange, for she’s not just in a strange place with strange people. She’s in a strange time. A DIFFERENT time. And everything she knew is about to change.

Nicholas Carter couldn’t take his eyes off the pale-haired girl from the minute he saw her on the deck of his boat. Racially discriminated against, and after somehow making it out of slavery, all he wants is to one day be the captain of his ow boat. Until Etta.

Drawn together like magnets, forced into work by the ruthless Ironwood family, Nicholas and Etta take a journey through time, piecing together clues, looking for an object that can change time and the world as we know it.

There’s No Time. No Time for This. No Time for Us.

Bluntly, Passenger did not impress me.

It had been a long long time since I picked up a memorable time travelling book, but this one seemed rather odd. While the concept of travelling itself was pretty complicated, there were no special aspects of this book that were time travel related that stuck with me. The music relation seemed very convenient, and there was nothing new about it. What does a passage look like? What does it feel like, and not the aftermath? It was lacking and yet complex.

I understand that Nicholas and Etta were destined to be together, but I just wasn’t feeling anything except the pull of what the other couldn’t have. It was the impossibility of not having each other and I get that, it’s just that I would have loved more chemistry filled conversations rather than pining.

What I did love about Passenger?

Well, THE PLACES. DUH. I loved how each place Nicholas and Etta travelled to was so GORGEOUSLY described, that it really felt like I was living there! BEAUTIFUL.

I also loved the sheer strength of the emotions that both main characters felt for the secondary characters – which was REALLY well done – and the little tie-ups in the present and the past (meeting younger selves of their loved ones in the past) which really intrigued me.

All in all, I will be reading Wayfarer, if just to see how time works out!